SanDisk has been a leader in the storage industry for more than 20 years. Founded in 1988 by Dr. Eli Harari, the company has grown from a three-person Silicon Valley startup to the world's largest provider of flash memory storage solutions. The company offers a wide range of products including memory cards, USB flash drives, SSDs and its popular line of Sansa music and video players.

Over the last year or so, SanDisk has introduced a number of new solid state drives for the consumer market. The latest addition to their product lineup is the Ultra Plus. This new consumer-oriented SSD is powered by Marvell's 88SS9175 controller chip and is equipped with SanDisk's own 19nm eX2 ABL MLC NAND to deliver up to 530MB/s read and 450MB/s write speeds. The Ultra Plus also packs 128MB of DRAM cache and offers features like TRIM support, dynamic wear-leveling, background garbage collection and SanDisk's nCache technology which uses a large non-volatile SLC cache to improve random write performance. The nCache accumulates small writes at high speed and then flushes them to the larger MLC section of the NAND flash memory array.

The Ultra Plus is available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities. For this review, SanDisk sent us the 256GB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 530 MB/s sequential read and 445 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 82,000 random read and 39,000 random write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the Ultra Plus has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at SanDisk's new SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the Ultra Plus have what it takes? Can it deliver the value and performance we've come to expect from SanDisk? Keep reading as we find out.